The Father Who Waited by the Road

How understanding the story of the Prodigal Son helps me find peace during a storm

Image credit: author.

We’re currently dealing with a rogue son learning to live with a traumatic brain injury post-divorce. He chooses to live in a car due to the lack of executive function that comes with excessive blunt force trauma to the head.

What follows is how I deal with the tough stuff. Nobody is exempt from living through tough stuff down here. We all face our trials. The question is, how do we rise to the occasion and get through it?

For me, love, understanding, and surrender lead the way. I did not choose this crash course in surrender. I found surrender by realizing I had been fighting myself for most of my life. Arguing with reality is futile.

Pursuing a spiritual understanding of life makes all the difference for me, which is why I want to share it with you. My spiritual way of being melds well with the many psychological tools in my toolkit.

The inner work takes a lot of practice and is essential.

Learning from the past, living in the present

When I read any book of the Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, or any other spiritual text, I seek to understand the intended cultural, historical, spiritual, and psychological lessons.

In other words, how can this verse or book help me live a better life? First, beware. Seek to understand. Find the similarities. If we take these words too literally, we end up living in an extreme, and we all know what that looks like.

Let’s take a closer look at one of the oldest stories in the Western world: the parable of the prodigal son. It’s more significant today than ever for me and my family. Here’s how it goes.

A father has two sons. The younger demands his inheritance early — a request so blunt that many readers hear an unspoken wish for his father’s death inside it — then leaves for a distant country and squanders everything on “wild living.”

A famine hits. He ends up feeding pigs, so hungry he envies their food. And then, Luke tells us, “he came to himself.” He heads home rehearsing an apology, expecting nothing more than a servant’s room. His father sees him from far off, runs to him, and throws a robe on his shoulders before the boy can finish his speech.

For years we read that story as being about the son

I see it as being about the father, the only character who never leaves the property and never stops actively loving someone who is destroying himself. I am that father today. And there are many fathers and mothers who could benefit from this ageless wisdom when confronted with family trauma and drama.

Here is what the parable does not say.

The father let him go. He did not chase the boy into the far country. He did not wire money to soften the famine. He did not track him down among the pigs to negotiate better terms. That love is fierce, but it is not controlling or rescuing.

It is a love that waits by the road. It is patient, understanding, and serene.

My family has lived the ending of that story before. Our eldest made his own share of poor choices years ago, choices with consequences serious enough that we did not always know, on the hardest nights, how the story would end. Today he is a living miracle: married, gainfully employed, healthy, and soon to be a father of two.

He came to himself, the way the boy in Luke’s gospel did, and we were still standing in the field when he did. That is not proof of a formula. It is proof that the far country is not always the end of the story.

Psychologically, this is one of the harder truths

Humans are wired to fix what is broken in our children, especially when the brokenness followed an injury that was not their fault. A traumatic brain injury damages executive function, the brain’s capacity for planning, sequencing, and impulse control, and it can turn a grown man back into someone who cannot manage the basic architecture of daily life, even while his personality and memories remain intact.

Watching that happen to our son, then a marriage end under the weight of it, then watching him end up sleeping in a car, activates every rescuing instinct a parent carries. Jung called this the pull of the parental complex, the unconscious belief that our children’s fate is still ours to author.

Letting go of that belief does not mean withdrawing love. It means recognizing where our authorship ends and his sovereignty, however impaired, begins.

This is where prayer and meditation stop being religious decoration and become psychological work for me. I am not writing only in metaphor about the desert. We live in an actual one, in a corner of Arizona where each summer arrives hotter and longer than the last, and there is something instructive about practicing stillness in a landscape that scorches anyone who fights it instead of adapting to it.

The hermits who withdrew into that same kind of literal wilderness to burn off their illusions were not running from the world. They were training themselves in a single discipline: letting go of the need to control outcomes while remaining fully present to what is. Meister Eckhart called it Gelassenheit, letting-be. I equate it to surrendering, letting go, and letting God run the show.

The Desert Fathers called it stillness

Whatever the name, it is the practice the father in the parable seems to have already mastered before the story begins. He does not pray for his son to come home. He keeps watching the road, keeps his house ready, keeps his heart soft, and trusts something larger than himself with the timing.

There is a metaphysical claim buried inside that patience. The father’s stillness is not passivity. It is faith that the deeper order of things, the higher power some call God and others simply call life, is still working on our son even in the far country, even among the pigs, even in a car in a parking lot at two in the morning.

We do not have to be the only intelligence attending to his healing. We just have to remain available when he comes to himself.

And we never stop loving our sons, no matter how much they do wrong. That is not a nice sentiment. It is the love my own father taught me, handed down like an inheritance worth more than money. I didn’t manufacture that kind of love out of willpower alone.

It’s within me and you and all of us. Any parent knows what I’m talking about. And you need not have a prodigal child to understand the power of letting go, or surrendering to win.

We cannot fix our son’s brain

He, like the rest of us, must become willing to do the inner work. We cannot undo the past or restore executive function through sheer parental will. What we can do, every morning, is sit in silence and hand the outcome to whatever we call the thing bigger than us.

Some days that looks like faith. Other days it looks like exhaustion wearing a robe of acceptance. Earlier this morning it looked like tears. I let them freely. Another powerful lesson I learned from my father.

For now, we keep watching the road. We keep the porch light on, the way that father must have, waiting for the shape of someone we love to appear, however far off, however changed.

And in the meantime, we will rise to become the best grandparents we can be for his children. My wife and I will once again rise to the occasion and get through this together, in unity.

---

Thanks for leaving a comment and restacking this article if it helped you.